I want to have a list of recipes which I rotate round every 4-6 weeks, which then creates a shopping list each week, minus any ingredients I still have in the fridge.
Does such a tool exist? All the meal planning apps are over complicated, focus on specific diets, and generally can’t seem to do this task.
The only downside is that it's quite pricey as you have to buy it seperately on each platform (ios, android, mac, pc). Personally I just have the ios version that works on both phone and tablet and use a browser bookmarklet to import recipes from my pc.
Whilst it has some UI quirks, you can tell its quite well thought out and nicely modelled. The cloud sync also works well between my wife and I (as mentioned by another comment).
Some niceties:
- Grocery list additions automatically get categorised by "Aisle" (e.g if you add "apples" it goes into "produce"). This makes shopping easier, as similar items are grouped.
- Recipes have ingredients, which can be selectively populated into your grocery list. Then, when you're looking down the list it maintains that "link" (ie I'm buying bread crumbs for xyz recipe), which is a +1 over pen and paper. This means if my wife gives me a list, but I cannot find an item, I'll at least know what that item was intended for so I can substitute.
It's great. Easily saves most recipes online. Allows you to tag them. You can schedule meals far out in advance from you personal recipe collection. From these scheduled meals you can create a shopping list.
I bought both the mobile and desktop (Windows) version. My fiance and I spend about 10 minutes a week discussing what we'd like to eat for the next 5-7 days. From there I schedule the meals in the app and, boom, I've got a shopping list. Super easy. I've put a lot of recipes from cook books in to the app.
We only use it for dinners and deserts, as breakfast and lunch are more predictable and repeatable.
Edit: another thing I like is that the app doesn't (yet, i think) require a subscription. to use it, after a trial period, is a one time payment
Easier is finding the same recipe on their website and importing that directly.
They also offer a bookmarklet (anyone remember those?), which I remember working well in Safari.
However, one thing that makes Paprika a no-go for our family is its inability to make shared collections of recipes, grocery lists, and meal plans. My wife and I want to cook together. We want to tweak our family recipes over time and share a single grocery list and meal plan between us.
Paprika can’t do that, and no other app comes close to Paprika in terms of features and payment model.
So, I’ve started building my own: Umami (https://www.umami.recipes).
Currently it’s just being used by my family and friends, but it’s starting to get to the point where I think other people might like to use it, so if you try it out please let me know what you think!
It supports shared collections of recipes and will soon have shared grocery lists and meal plans as well.
> Recipe sites have really gone downhill with all the ads and life stories...I just want to cook dinner!
Couldn’t agree more. I think having a way to import recipes without the fluff is a table stakes feature for any recipe app (and was the very first part of it I built).
Unless you want fine grained control over this (what to share, what not to share) then paprika supports this just fine. It syncs between multiple devices so you can just add more - that's what I do.
I just checked Paprika again. There is no way to share a folder/category of recipes with someone else. Sharing each recipe individually is not really what I want to be doing either.
Personally I switched to https://crouton.app but that won’t work if you’re on Windows.
So to answer your question: I don't. I keep myself open and let myself be guided by my current appetite and my instinct.
I tried having a meal plan in the past and that just proved to be more of a hassle and incredibly boring.
This way, as the chaos of life occurs we can quickly alter who purchases what.
What does seem to help is a blank sheet of paper on my fridge with the main things I have in it (meats, fishes, main perishables), and the various days I plan on fixing them. I generally enjoy cooking but sometimes after work my brain is just too fried to think and having a "sane default" helps me go on autopilot. With the sheet being structureles, I can annotate, cross-out, and change on a whim.
This also helps me keep track of freshness when I have things that go bad sooner than others.
About 4 days of the week, I cook only for my wife and me and 3 days/week I cook for friends that we invite; 4-6 per meal from the people that live here. Sometimes it's lazy cooking (nothing microwave or from a package, but a quick asian stir-fry or something), sometimes elaborate; depends on how much time we have (if we have work in the evening).
It is a lot less fun, but I've lost in excess of 50 pounds with meal planning + exercise. It is definitely more boring, but that's been an acceptable loss in the bigger picture.
There are a couple of operations that are a little bit clunky, but everything else makes up for it.
I have no association with "Eat This Much" other than being a customer and a fan.
https://sortedfood.com/sidekick/
They also run an awesome YouTube channel that is worth checking out:
Https://plantoeat.com
It has the same features as Paprika but Generates a shopping list from your meal plan. Saves a ton of time when shopping.
The one thing I don’t like about PtE is you can’t mark off ingredients as you prep them. Paprika has this and I miss it.
But just mentioning Paprika does indeed allow you to populate your shopping list from your meal plan, or from an individual recipe. I use this feature frequently.
They would usually fix bugs a few months later, so I do presume someone is reading the email, but yeah, expect silence if you do reach out.
That said, I’m still happy enough to recommend using them.
It's an app that I have built with my team over the last few months to streamline the cooking at home process.
I signed up just when they were still in the "e-mailing every client personally phase", and it's been a joy to talk to Christian and see their product improve.
My wife and I semi-asynchronously, find 3-4 recipes each and send each other links/(book,title,pg no) in chat. Then one of us drafts and email, referencing each recipe and the list of required ingredients, and finally sends it to both of us.
We then enter an order online for grocery pickup and stock the fridge. When we wish to make dinner, we reference the latest "menu" email and simply pick one of the items from the list.
Sometimes we'll chain menu items like chili -> chili dogs or tritip -> sandwiches, but for the most part it's operates like a grab bag for the week.
It's easy enough to go back and search for any old "menu" email as far back as we want and because everything is referenced by url or citation, we can add it to the next menu by navigating to the url or pulling the cookbook from the shelf.
The reference system work great during cooking too. I can pull up the recipe on my phone in the kitchen and follow the recipe there, or again, pull the cookbook from the shelf.
The flexibility of email is an advantage here. It works as a substrate for a process rather than railroading the process itself. You see, any app that replaced this would have to handle this specific workflow. It's easier to build a robust workflow on a flexible substrate than on a brittle bespoke substrate like an app.
If you don't want to bother with self hosting they offer hosting plans as well [1].
[1] - https://tandoor.dev/ [2] - https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes
The closest to what you're asking for that I'm aware of is probably Grocy: https://grocy.info/
Personally, I find that "keeping track of what you have" introduces a LOT of micro-management. Too much for me to enjoy, so while I used Grocy productively for a while, I eventually ditched it.
On the simpler side - There's Mealie (https://hay-kot.github.io/mealie/) and Tandoor (https://tandoor.dev/)
They both manage to import recipes fine, and do meal planning fairly well. Tandoor is a little closer to Grocy in that it's smart enough to group ingredients for your shopping list (mealie will generate duplicate entries for the same item if used in two different recipes), but otherwise they're fairly similar.
It's integrated with Sainsbury's with one-click basket transfer, an option to remove items you already have, and a recipe uploader for your favourites. Early days so feedback really welcome.
Happy to answer any questions people have!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grocery-smart-shopping-list/id...
One tool I've had bookmarked for this is Cooklang (https://cooklang.org/) which seems to cover most of the needs.
EDIT: there's also an Obsidian plugin: https://github.com/deathau/cooklang-obsidian
1. Plan meal using Google Sheet, one tab per week. I now have 1.5 year of meals, so I can easily find old ideas
2. Add all ingredients in a ToDo app (using Microsoft ToDo currently)
3. Look in my fridge and drawers, mark any remaining ingredients as done.
4. Go grocery shopping
1. I'm reminded to pick meals on Sunday 2. I select a couple of interesting recipes and it creates a grocery list. The recipes are varied but not too varied to induce choice paralysis. Dietary restrictions are automatically applied from your account settings. 3. It has its own cooking mode with great features like "every step tells you exactly how much of an ingredient you need" and "hold your hand over the screen to progress" so I don't get crap on my phone.
I've been using it for over a month now and am still happy with it.
Each meal is then automatically kept in rotation or dropped based on the score (i can keep ones my wife and I especially like even if the kids don't). Each family member can choose one meal for the following week, or I can generate a random list for existing meals. I can search by cuisine, ingredients, score, and a few other bits of data.
The app also will print out a weekly shopping list of ingredients based on meals selected, AND will take into account what ingredients I have on hand. However, although the app does provide an accurate list of ingredients, it hinges on me updating the ingredients I have in my pantry and I don't typically do this as it is manual and too time consuming - It was neat to do an initial inventory of ingredients when I built the app, and the app does subtract ingredients out when used in meals for the week, but i no longer update the ingredients when I purchase from store each week.
So if you know how to code, you code probably just roll your own as I did. Then it will have all the features YOU want. But as others have said here, there probably will be a solution out there that will meet your needs.
Most significantly, we plan for leftovers, such that a recipe covers at least 2 dinners. This way we can get through a working week only cooking twice. Disclaimer: this is more difficult if you're preparing for a family rather than two. At any rate, the advantage is we can sink in time for a more elaborate meal without it feeling like a slog. If we cooked every night, it would just be "sheet-pan, sheet-pan, stir-fry, casserole, dump your spice rack into it and hope for the best".
I use a recipe app, but the only value added I'm detecting from your request is copy-pasting ingredients from several recipes into one list. That's just text you already have.
I made it a native Android app instead of a web app because I wanted it to function offline with the data on the device. Too often I was in the grocery store and wanted to tick off the shopping list but didn't have any internet connection...
Unfortunately, it's not yet ready to share. It does already have a recipe database, shopping lists (which are not yet filled automatically) and meal planning for breakfast lunch and dinner with all that beeing synced to other devices. But it does still lack user management and does still have too many bugs and glitches.
And life's got too many other challenges at the moment so I do not have much time to develop it at the moment.
Edit: Also thought about implementing automatic generation of shopping lists omitting things which are still in stock but didn't find a good way of tracking what's still in stock without having too much work with keeping that up-to-date.
Their recipe + meal planner + grocery list (and general list planning) is killer. I love that I can share all of the above with anybody in my household that I want to.
Lists also integrate with Google Assistant so I can ask google to put stuff on the grocery list via voice.
Cons: They are skimpy in protein, more expensive and sometimes the ingredients are not the most fresh. But they often have a sign up discount, which makes it more affordable
There's a reason why there isn't a successful app out there, since this is 1) highly personalized and 2) very tedious (manually inputting ingredients, etc).
[0] https://www.copymethat.com/features/meal-planner/ [1] https://www.copymethat.com/features/shopping-list/
You can generate your rotation and plot it out 6 month in advance. And then see how long you can be bothered to follow a meal plan.
With regards to shopping lists I’m not sure how you imagine keeping an app up to date on what you already have, so I think that would be just as cumbersome regardless.
Each of the meals on the list are a top level reminder on the Shopping List. All of the ingredients for that meal are an indented sub-item to that reminder list.
Each week my wife and I plan what meals we want to eat and "unselect" them from the reminder list (you have to choose: Show Completed) and then that automatically provides the shopping list.
Before we go shopping we check what we have in the cupboards and mark those off the list - the remainder is what we need to buy.
Each of the high level recipes has meta data with the link to the recipe if it's online or the main protein so that we can try to vary things as we plan.
And it's shared between us to-boot, so whenever one of us is near a supermarket and we're wondering if anything is needed we have a sync'd up shopping list in our pocket.
Mealime. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I originally bought it because I liked the planned meals that have a nice overlap of ingredients, so you end up with a surprisingly small shopping list for a range of different meals
But also, the recipes are all a nice medium complexity: 99.9% of ingredients are easily available from any supermarket, even discounters
They clearly have a small number of chefs, so the recipes overlap in ways that really let you improve your skills. I went from so so in the kitchen, to decently skilled
It also lets you build plans based around what’s left in your pantry
Fantastic app. Take my money
You really do need very little food to make a cheap, nutritious and satisfying meal.
The problem is updating the food repo it makes all the decisions off. Your food changes almost hourly -- not even just you eating snacks but certain foods being eaten by friends, food going off, accidents etc. This makes it nigh on impossible to account for without Sisyphean effort on the end user. Who can easily do this if they have a special diet as they're already committed to such a lifestyle change.
Being able to look at the a food stock and determine dozens of meals is a skill worth honing rather than pursing the "data entry" approach and letting the algo look after the rest.
I found this [0] cooking blog that has atleast 90 meal plans.
My wife and I just pick them at random and kept the good ones in rotation.
Print them out - a page each recipe and one for the grocery list - do a quick cupboard check before heading to the shops, and store it in a clear plastic folder for next time. Rinse and repeat.
/Me Mumbles something about the time it takes to automate vs the time it takes to actually just do it
[0] https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/
NB: we've since fallen off the wagon and now struggle to meal plan, but we would've done the same with an app as well!
I work out a lot and dabble in powerlifting / bodybuilding so I try to track my diet and workouts pretty closely. I haven't found any single app / tool that does everything I want it to.
I struggle with meal variety, shopping lists, and making sure N meals fit xyz macros.
I'm working on a tool where you can basically start from a super basic meal plan / grocery list and then expand the meal variety over time.
I'm also working on various methods of workout / goal tracking.
It's pretty far off from something I can release, even in MVP form, but if anybody is interested feel free to shoot me an email and I can add you to my list of potential early access / testers.
Code's available at https://github.com/umangsh/famnom and https://github.com/umangsh/famnom_flutter if you want to run your own app and server.
I'm frustrated by all the freemium apps and want to release something completely free for full recipe/shopping management. To me, that's baseline functionality.
The main difference in your description is that the shopping list can be auto generated by selected recipes planned against a calendar. e.g. I want to cook these 5 recipes this week and my shopping list automatically aggregates to say "3 onions" instead of 3 separate entries for onions. I don't have a "pantry" yet but can very easily see that in the future.
For a month, I made lists for each shop I bought stuff from (costco, safeway, sprouts, etc) adding whatever I bought there. With those in place, the pain of grocery shopping is reduced to going through the list and picking the usual suspects.
One habit that made it even easier was to make sure the list is updated the moment I think I need to buy something. (iCloud sync across devices is a lifesaver here. Siri is also useful sometimes)
This extends to meal prep too. But that's not a problem I have today.
I look for no further solutions on this.
No app really seems to do it PERFECTLY, and it's a complicated space because of the variability. We looked at many of the apps listed here and they all have pro's and cons. These pros and cons seem to align largely the personas we discovered during our process. IIRC the stickiest users seemed to be athletes or folks on highly restrictive diets.
The best we could figure out is a quiz on what ingredients remained before generating a grocery list.
Every meal is different, simple, and healthy; and it's removed the hassle of having to figure out what to cook and what to buy.
It integrates with online groceries, but I believe it may only be available for the UK, unless the list of supermarkets changes based on location.
I'm not affiliated with them at all, just a happy customer
[0] https://gist.github.com/Raudius/f24b9718c5bcb88eedc03bc8a5fa...
This app made by Ben Awad seems to cover all your needs. It's free for up to 25recipes and after that it's 5$/month for 1k recipes, it has both mobile and web versions.
Edit: it also has a pretty neat recipe scraper feature
Been using it since 2019 to fantastic results, tweaking my diet to both gain and lose weight as appropriate.
Edit: additionally this works internationally reasonably well, though I do find the odd ingredient that seems to be specific to the United States in some of the recipes, but usually easily swapped out and saved as a custom receipe.
1. Table of cooking for the next week or so
2. Checklist for groceries
That's it.
I poked around at apps or building something and eventually concluded it just added complexity, and the classic, generalist tools are actually fantastic and less work than something tailor-made for the job.
After a couple years, we unsubscribed, but kept all the PDF weekly planners we'd paid for
The prices may not be correct anymore, but the shopping lists for the meals haven't changed :)
Alternatively, you can just do what my family did when I was a kid - tuna casserole night, spaghetti night, hot dog night, pizza night, etc
If you find any issues or have a feature request, I can make it happen.
1. App to write down known and tried recipes ( for reference when you cook ) (EnRecipes)
2. Recipes, for ideas ( any cook book )
3. App to rotate written down recipes for healthy diet. based on app 1. data ( ??? )
4. App to take care of shopping list and fridge, based on app 1. and 3. data ( ??? )
Currently I’ve got a series of shortcuts that do almost all of this; the recipes stored in a notes folder.
The diffed shopping list is the only missing part, you’d have to keep track of fridge inventory somehow.
I won’t claim this saved any time over using some app, but it does work exactly how I want it.
Its name is Gaintrain: https://gaintrainapp.com
There are recipes I sometimes consult online, but otherwise, I have most of the information in my head.
Existing software is either as you said
A) Too focused on a certain feature, and will lack some specific feature you need
B) Too broad and therefore too overcomplicated.
I use the sync function with my wife (logged into the same account) to manage shopping lists and recipes
For example, here's mine which I don't really use or meal planning, only for recipes, but it does have more than plenty of meal planning features built-in as well
AnyList has categories, and I think you can organize them.
I think it would be useful but probably not profitable.
One feature that might not be obvious, at least here in the UK, is that it has integrations with most online supermarkets so you can relatively painlessly add your recipe shopping list to your online basket.
I'm currently testing Crouton and RecipeChef.
So far it works really well.